Despite the box office success, the critical response to Pearl Harbor at the time of its release tended to be very negative, and the film earned only a 25% approval rating according to review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 188 reviews with an average rating of 4.4/10, making it Bay's fourth worst reviewed movie to date, next to Transformers: Age of Extinction, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and behind Bad Boys II.[6] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 44 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews."[7] While it earned praise for its technical achievements, the screenplay and acting were popular targets for critics.
Roger Ebert gave the film one and a half stars and wrote, "The film has been directed without grace, vision, originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialogue, it will not be because you admire them" and criticized its liberties with historical facts: "There is no sense of history, strategy or context; according to this movie, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because America cut off its oil supply, and they were down to an 18-month reserve. Would going to war restore the fuel sources? Did they perhaps also have imperialist designs? Movie doesn't say".[8] In a similar vein, A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote, "Nearly every line of the script drops from the actors' mouths with the leaden clank of exposition, timed with bad sitcom beats".[9] USA Today gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "Ships, planes and water combust and collide in Pearl Harbor, but nothing else does in one of the wimpiest wartime romances ever filmed."[10]
In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, "although this Walt Disney movie is based, inspired and even partially informed by a real event referred to as Pearl Harbor, the movie is actually based on the movies Top Gun, Titanic and Saving Private Ryan. Don't get confused."[11] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "Affleck, Hartnett and Beckinsale – a British actress without a single worthy line to wrap her credible American accent around – are attractive actors, but they can't animate this moldy romantic triangle".[12] Time magazine's Richard Schickel criticized the film's love triangle: "It requires a lot of patience for an audience to sit through the dithering. They're nice kids and all that, but they don't exactly claw madly at one another. It's as if they know that someday they're going to be part of "the Greatest Generation" and don't want to offend Tom Brokaw. Besides, megahistory and personal history never integrate here".